Benny Hango sat up slowly and raised his hands. His hard eyes flickered into the candle-light. And then Benny’s kid pulled the surprise. He came up from a squat to a standing position and Bill thought the kid was going to try and reach Hango’s gun. Bill took a quick step forward and got the kid by the hair. Joey Hango simply stuck out his foot and pushed the orange crate over toward his dad.
The gun went with the orange crate, and Benny took it out of midair as it fell. He brought the gun around toward Bill Teed. Bill Teed was a hard man to gun because he was thin and fast and kept his nerves in cold storage. Besides, he had a wide edge on Hango. Bill got in the first and last shot and it took Hango through the right arm. Hango dropped his gun, and his face crimped with pain.
Bill Teed came down with both knees into Hango’s middle, drove the killer’s breath out of him. He got out handcuffs. Hango’s half-pint kid came tearing in, his thin arms going like windmills, his lips naming the cop. Bill flicked the kid a glance, saw the wild, berserk gleam in his eyes. He warned, “Keep out, kid,” then grunted explosively as the kid’s dad landed a short blow to his middle.
Bill Teed slapped his gun barrel to the side of Hango’s head to stun him while he got the handcuffs on. Joey shrilled: “You leave my old man alone!” He beat both fists into the small of Teed’s back. Teed brought his right elbow back sharply and the point of it cracked to the kid’s chin. The kid went flat, and the crack of his head against the floor had more to do with keeping him quiet than the blow. Bill brought the dazed Hango’s wrists together and clamped the cuffs in place.
Teed stood up, turned around, looked at Joey. He said: “It’s tough, kid.” Joey didn’t say anything. His dark eyes were glassy, his teeth ground together. The kid was dazed but he was coming out of it.
Teed heard the popping of coal particles under foot, looked up, saw Pop Walker coming through the door. “I called headquarters,” he said, “as soon as I saw where you were going. There’ll be a wagon for Hango. I’ll take the kid with me.”
Joey Hango sat up. He said shrilly: “I’m going with my old man.”
Teed shook his head. “You won’t like it there. We’re giving you a break. Haven’t you got enough sense to take it?” He went over to Benny Hango, grabbed him by the handcuffs. “You get up on your feet, Benny. If you were planning to lam out of here tonight I guess you can walk as far as the police car.”
Hango got to his feet. Sweat stood out on his thin, ugly face. He took one step with Teed and stopped. He hitched himself around so he could divide what he was going to give out between Teed and Pop Walker. “Get this,” he said. “That’s my kid. No damn thing you can do or say can take him away from me. If I take the squat for this, you two mugs are gonna hear from my kid, see?”
Joey Hango was hit hard, seeing his old man taken by a single cop. He didn’t seem to notice the affectionate arm Pop Walker threw over his shoulder. He kept his head down and the lower lip of his fine mouth was trembling.
Teed gave Benny a jerk. He said: “I heard that kind of mouthy fireworks from tougher mugs than you. But when you face the chair—”
Benny Hango cut through with a laugh. “You know what I’ll do if it comes to that? Spit inna warden’s eye. Let’s go. So long, kid.”
As Teed and the killer moved off toward the door, Joey tried to break away from Pop Walker. His voice, broken, sobbing, cried out: “I wanna go with my old man!” His puny fists lashed out at Pop Walker’s moon of a face up there just beyond reach. Walker hung on to the kid.
Benny Hango, down at headquarters proved he was tough stuff. He couldn’t be broken. The cops had an air-tight case against him for murder, but they couldn’t get any information out of him as to whom he had been with on the bank job. Benny Hango might have been a rat, he had a rat’s animal courage now that he was cornered.
All during the trial, Benny Hango’s son lived at Pop Walker’s apartment. Teed couldn’t understand that at first, unless Joey Hango was just getting a big kick out of sleeping in a bed and getting his meals regularly and not having to steal the money he spent. Pop Walker was gone on the kid. He gave Joey money and told him to go down and buy himself a new suit. Bill Teed just shook his head and told Pop he had said good-bye to fifty bucks and the kid, too. But the kid came back, dolled up in the damndest pool-room regalia Bill Teed had ever seen. The kid even had a derby hat.
Joey Hango would sit around the apartment all day while Pop Walker was covering Hango’s trial. He didn’t seem to be interested in what happened to his old man.
One day when Pop Walker and Teed were eating at the same lunch counter, Pop told Bill that he had put Joey on the honor system. The kid would do whatever he thought he wanted to do and could go anywhere, only he had to tell Pop about it when he got back. As he told this, Pop’s round face became radiant. He was going to make something of the kid, he said.
“Yes,” Pop said, chuckling, “the little devil got mixed up in a pool game at Rudy’s the other night. He lost six bits. He came home and told me about that. And when—”
“Did he tell you that he played at Rudy’s with a member of the Jigger Cullem mob, a gunman named Spig Morrava?” Bill asked.
The radiance of Pop’s face dimmed a little. “Not Joey,” he said. “Somebody else was. Morrava was there, but Joey didn’t have anything to do with him. He told me.”
Bill looked at Pop. He forced a laugh. “I was just kidding.” But he wasn’t kidding. He had seen Joey with Spig Morrava quite frequently. He had seen Joey give Morrava money — money that Joey got from Pop Walker. The way Bill figured it, Benny Hango had been working with the Cullem mob on that bank job. Jigger Cullem and his boys were just about broke, Bill thought, for they were unable to spend the hot loot they had taken from the bank. They were picking up money for food where they could find it, waiting for their loot to cool off.
Bill figured that was why Morrava was patronizing the Hango kid — because the pocket money that Pop furnished Joey could be used toward buying the Cullem mob food and drink. But Bill couldn’t tell that to Pop Walker just then. Pop would have taken it too hard.
The trial of Benny Hango came out the only way that it could and the date for his death in the chair was set. Benny didn’t take his sentence lying down but tried to climb the judge’s bench and tell everybody off. You couldn’t tell, though, whether this was defiance or a sort of yellow-livered hysteria.
You could see Pop Walker’s hand in the stuff the Courier printed about the trial. Pop was trying to make things easier for Joey Hango. Joey didn’t seem to care one way or another. He continued to live off Pop and pal around with Spig Morrava.
“What do you intend to do with the kid?” Teed asked Pop.
“Well, as soon as all the publicity has died down and there’s no chance of Joey being recognized as Benny’s son I’m going to send him to a military school. I’ll make a man of him.”
Bill thought: “Maybe you are if Morrava and Jigger Cullem don’t make something else out of him first.”
Then there was that night when Joey Hango tried to break into a grocery store with a key somebody had given him. Bill had been following the kid and collared him before Joey got the door open. Somebody was covering for the kid — somebody in a car up the alley. That somebody fired a shot that didn’t do any damage and then took it on the lam, leaving the kid with Teed. Bill Teed took the kid straight to Pop Walker and told Pop the story as quickly and as painlessly as possible.